Monday, April 30, 2012

Old Testament Manuscripts

In this follow up to the last post, we discuss important manuscripts (hand-written copies) of the Old Testament.

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The Oldest Manuscripts of the Old
Testament

Frontispiece of the Leningrad Codex, known as Leningradensis

The original manuscripts (the autographs) written by the sacred
authors themselves are no longer extant for any book of the Bible. The oldest partial copies of the text of any
biblical book are to be found among the Dead Sea Scrolls (treated in next post). However, the oldest complete manuscript of
the Hebrew of the protocanonical books of the Old Testament is a codex (a book formed by leaves of paper
stitched on one side; i.e. the form of book most familiar to us) called Leningradensis, held in the Imperial
Russian Library in St. Petersburgh (formerly Leningrad). Leningradensis
is a complete copy of the Masoretic
Text written in Galilee around AD 1000.

The Masoretic Text

The Masoretic Text is the standard Hebrew form of the books of the
Jewish Bible, the form used for

chant and proclamation in traditional Jewish
synagogues to this day. It takes its
name from the Masoretes, a school of
Jewish scribes who flourished between AD 700 to AD 1000. The Masoretes raised the reproduction of the
Hebrew Scriptures to a high art. Among other
innovations, they devised a system of markings (called “points”) placed above
and below the Hebrew consonants to indicate the vowel to be pronounced after
the consonant. In this way, they were
able for the first time to record in writing the Jewish oral tradition of the
pronunciation of Scripture. The
Masoretes also introduced various quality control measures for the reproduction
of manuscripts: they tabulated the number of words and letters in each biblical
book. Subsequently, every newly-written
copy was carefully counted to verify its accuracy.

Leningradensis
is almost universally regarded as the oldest and best copy of the Masoretic Text, the name given to the
precise form the Hebrew developed by the Masoretes as their standard. When translating or studying the Old
Testament today, scholars typically begin from the Hebrew of the Masoretic
text, usually a printed (or increasingly, an electronic) edition of
Leningradensis.

The Septuagint

When translating the Old Testament,
scholars also consult the readings of the Septuagint,
the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament books.

According
to a semi-legendary account in a document known as the Letter of Aristeas, the Septuagint translation was begun when the
Hellenistic king of Alexandria in Egypt, Ptolemy II, brought Jewish scribes
from Jerusalem to Alexandria in order to translate the sacred books of the Jews
into Greek for the Library of Alexandria in the third century BC. According to the legend, seventy scholars
were commissioned for this project: thus the name Septuagint, meaning “seventy,” and the commonly used abbreviation “LXX,”
the Roman numeral for seventy.

Although
the accounts of the translation of the Septuagint in the Letter of Aristeas, Philo, Josephus, and other ancient authors
sound embellished, the historical kernel of the story seems plausible and fits
known data: Ptolemy II commissioned a Greek translation of the Pentateuch for
his library. The translation of the
Pentateuch was the first and perhaps best, and dates to c. 250 BC. The remaining Old Testament books were
translated progressively over the next two centuries. The Septuagint translation began to circulate
in a collection that was broader than the Hebrew canon mentioned by Josephus [discussed many posts ago], and did not have a clear limit—in other words, the Septuagint had
an open canon, including
deuterocanonical works and some apocrypha.

The
quality and style of translation exhibited in the LXX can vary quite widely
from book to book. The rendering of
Daniel in the LXX, for example, was so loose that the Church replaced it with a
better translation executed by Theodotion, a Hellenistic Jew of the second century AD. Other books, such as Genesis, were much more
literal in translation.

The
LXX translation carried enormous prestige in the ancient world. Jewish scholars like the philosopher Philo
and the historian Josephus regarded it as virtually inspired, a view shared by
some Church Fathers. For the millions of
Greek-speaking Jews living in the Roman Empire outside of Palestine, it was the
only form of the Scriptures they used.
The majority of the Old Testament quotations in the New Testament are
taken from the LXX, since the Apostles and other New Testament
authors typically wrote for a broad audience, rather than just the Jews of
Palestine.

In
the fourth century A.D., the Church, with the newly-acquired support of the Roman
government, had the resources to produce codices
(bound books, not scrolls) of the entire bible for use in major churches
(e.g. Cathedrals). Our oldest more-or-less
complete manuscripts of the entire Bible, consisting of the Septuagint plus the
New Testament in Greek, come from this century.
The three most important are named for the places they were found or now
reside: Vaticanus, the best
manuscript of the complete Greek Bible, Old and New Testaments, stored in the
Vatican Libraries at least since the middle ages; Alexandrinus, an excellently-preserved Greek Bible from Alexandria,
now stored in the British Library; and Sinaiticus,
another Septuagint + Greek New Testament discovered in the nineteenth century in St.
Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai, and now also residing in the British
Library.

The
Septuagint remains the official version of the Old Testament in use by the
Greek Orthodox Church.

Revisions of the Septuagint

Before the rise of Christianity,
Jewish authors like Philo and Josephus had high praise and reverence for the
Septuagint translation. As Christianity
grew and became the leading religion of the Roman Empire, however, a reaction
set in, especially among Jews in Palestine.
Increasingly, Jews rejected the Septuagint, calling it inaccurate and
misleading. At least three
Greek-speaking Jewish scholars published recensions
(revised versions) of the Septuagint which were closer to the Hebrew in use
in Palestine: Aquila (c. AD 130), Theodotion (c. AD 150?), and Symmachus (c. AD
170).

The Latin Vulgate

Also of some value to Bible scholars
and translators is the Vulgate, the
Latin translation of the Catholic Bible executed (largely) by St. Jerome in the
late fourth and early fifth centuries.
St. Jerome translated most of the biblical books of the Old Testament
directly from the best Hebrew copies he was able to procure. However, the Hebrew available to St. Jerome
tended, by and large, closely to resemble the Masoretic Text we now have. For that reason, when the Masoretic Text is
itself unclear or appears disturbed, St. Jerome’s Vulgate is usually not
helpful in resolving the issues.

Other Ancient Versions and the Cairo
Geniza

Scholars also consult other ancient versions (that is, translations) of the
Old Testament, such as the Syriac translation (known as the Peshitta), the
Coptic (Egyptian), and Ethiopic versions.
Fragments of biblical books dating to the medieval period were also
found in the genizah (a store room
for worn biblical scrolls) of the oldest synagogue in Cairo in the nineteenth
century. Many of these “Cario genizah”
texts have been published and are of some interest to biblical scholars.

3 comments:

Thank you, John for this useful summary.May I suggest that you add to Codex Lenigradensis the Aleppo Codex, which is one or two centuries older? It is not as complete as L, but where it is available it is now used as a basis in some critical editions, such as that of the Hebrew University.Also, I would suggest that the revision of the Greek Daniel is now considered pre-Theodotionic, as it is already quoted in the NT.As my last suggestion, I would say that the LXX is completed during the I b.C., as the book of Wisdom is likely composed after 31 b.C., since it knows about the Roman conquest of Egypt.

Dear Prof. Fabbri:Thank you for the excellent suggestions! I will incorporate them in future summaries! I debated whether to discuss the Aleppo codex, and ended up omitting it for the sake of simplicity in this summary; but in view of its growing importance, it probably merits inclusion.What is your opinion about the "canon" of the LXX? Specifically, do you think a first century (AD) Jew would have thought of Wisdom as "belonging" to the same "translation" (or at least, collection of texts) that included the LXX Pentateuch?

Sorry for taking so long. About the Septuagint canon, I think that the 2001 document of the PCB reflects adequately the consensus. The Law and the Prophets were already accepted as groups of sacred books at the time when the NT was written. The Psalms are also quoted and referred to. As for the other Writings, they don't seem to be a closed group as late as the letter of Jude. It seems that two different groups were defined within the Rabbinic Judaism and the Church. It seems that different criteria were used. It is apparent that the Rabbis don't accept any book that was composed in Greek, while the Church, that was already using NT writings, had no problem with Greek books. Also, those books that could be understood as a preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ, were more readily accepted by the Church. This seems to have happened with books like Baruch (see 3,38) or the Wisdom (se chapters 2 and 9).This is not all, of course, but I hope it can be useful.